I have to admit, I fell in love with my dress as soon as I saw it… in a magazine.

In my eyes, I knew this would be it and nothing can top this dress. As I mentioned in my very first post, I grabbed monthly bridal magazines on the stands and subscribed to Brides and Martha Stewart Wedding.

I called every bridal store in San Diego. No luck. So I called up North and visited Mary Me Bridal in the City of Orange. It was the first dress I tried on and I was right.. it was MY dress! I should have tried the other dresses I brought into the dressing room so that I can pretend I was on the show “Say Yes to the Dress.” haha!

A couple of years ago I found a vintage luggage at the Kobey’s Swap Meet, our local outdoor market. I wanted to incorporate this luggage as our card box. But when it came down to it, I didn’t want to ruin the luggage.

So I found this decorative cardboard luggage box at Michaels. Fitting, since we planned our honeymoon in Europe.

Since I had extra muslin bags from our favors, I used it for our card box. I split the bags so it would be lighter and that way I did not need to sew the top. I stenciled the letters C-A-R-D-S with the same paint I used for the key ring bags.

I punctured a hole on each side of the luggage and strung the above bags with the same twine I used for our invites. And Voilà!, our wedding card box:

“Themoney dance, dollar dance, or apron dance is an event at some wedding receptions in various cultures. During a money dance, male guests pay to dance briefly with the bride, and sometimes female guests pay to dance with the groom. The custom originated in Poland in the early 1900s in immigrant neighborhoods.

Sometimes guests are told that the money will be used for the bride and groom’s honeymoon or to give them a little extra cash with which to set up housekeeping.“

We did this honeymoon / money dance at our reception. It was fun! Our DJs didn’t play typical slow songs during our honeymoon / money dance but they played fun, non-explicit, music. The kids loved it.. they danced in between Patrick and myself. It was cute!

At a couple of weddings I have been to, there would be a person (usually a bridesmaid and/or groomsmen) standing near the dance floor passing out pins to the guests to pin the cash onto the bride and groom’s clothing. I didn’t really want anyone to be doing this at the reception so I came up with an idea of having the pins on each table. However, I didn’t want to just place a box of pins on the tables so I came up with this:

I purchased the purple pin cushions at JoAnn’s Fabric Craft and on Ebay, and the mini clay pots and pins from Michaels. We printed the tags on the same paper we used for all our stationary.

One of the first details we purchased were the favors. Honestly, I had no idea what favors we would have for the wedding. But I came across these by accident around April of last year. I was actually looking for mini skeleton keys for the escort cards and came across these awesome skeleton key bottle openers:

They sat in our guestroom closet for a couple of months until we figured out what we wanted our tags to look like. After figuring out what we wanted our stationary design to look like (post about that soon), here is what we came up with:

For presentation purposes, I did not want to attach the key rings to the key because I thought it made it look tacky. So what I did was placed muslin drawstring bags on each table with the key rings in them. I stenciled the words “P.S. Rings for your Keys” on each bag.

Thank you to my husband, Leah (sister/MOH), Melanie (bridesmaid), and Eleanor (cousin) for helping me with the favors!